WASHINGTON (AP) — Higher energy costs and the steepest rise in food prices in nearly four decades drove wholesale prices up last month by the most in nearly two years. Excluding those categories, inflation was tame.

The Producer Price Index rose a seasonally adjusted 1.6 percent in February, the Labor Department said Wednesday. That’s double the 0.8 percent rise from the previous month. Outside of food and energy costs, the core index ticked up 0.2 percent, less than January’s 0.5 percent rise.

Food prices soared 3.9 percent last month, the biggest gain since November 1974. Most of that increase was due to a sharp rise in vegetable costs, which increased nearly 50 percent. That was the most in almost a year. Meat and dairy products also rose.

Energy prices rose 3.3 percent last month, led by a 3.7 percent increase in gasoline costs.

David Resler, an economist at Nomura Securities, said the jump in prices is likely temporary, echoing remarks made by the Federal Reserve on Tuesday. Much of the increase in food prices was due to winter freezes in Florida, Texas and other agricultural areas, Resler said. Turmoil in the Middle East is a major reason that motorists are facing higher gas prices.

But John Ryding, an economist at RDQ Economics, disagreed, noting that consumers will feel the impact for some time.

“We do not buy the Fed’s reassurance that these pressures will be temporary and we believe the public, seeing these strong increases in food and energy … will not be marking back down their inflation expectations,” Ryding said.

Gas prices spiked in February and are even higher now. The national average price was $3.56 a gallon Tuesday, up 43 cents, or 13.7 percent, from a month earlier, according to the AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge. Rising demand for oil in fast-growing emerging economies such as China and India has pushed up prices in recent months. Unrest in Libya, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries has also sent prices higher.

But economists expect the earthquake in Japan to lower oil prices for the next month or two, which should temper increases in wholesale prices in coming months. Japan is a big oil consumer, and its economy will suffer in the aftermath of the quake. But as the country begins to rebuild later this year, the cost of oil and other raw materials, such as steel and cement, could rise.

Oil prices fell sharply Tuesday as fears about Japan’s nuclear crisis intensified. Oil dropped $4.01, or 4 percent, to settle at $97.18 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Prices rose 1 percent for apparel, the most in 21 years. Costs also increased for cars, jewelry, and consumer plastics.

There was little sign of inflationary pressures outside of food and energy. Core prices have increased 1.8 percent in the past 12 months.

Separately, the Commerce Department said Wednesday that home construction plunged to a seasonally adjusted 479,000 homes last month, down 22.5 percent from the previous month. It was lowest level since April 2009, and the second-lowest on records dating back more than a half-century.

The building pace is far below the 1.2 million units a year that economists consider healthy.

Two-and-a-half years into Obama’s presidency, food prices are the worst, and home construction is the lowest, in more than 36 years. Obviously it’s Bush’s fault. Because all liberals can do is spew demagoguery and lies.

In accounts of the political unrest sweeping through the Middle East, one factor, inflation, deserves more attention. Nothing can be more demoralizing to people at the low end of the income scale—where great masses in that region reside—than increases in the cost of basic necessities like food and fuel. It brings them out into the streets to protest government policies, especially in places where mass protests are the only means available to shake the existing power structure.

The consumer-price index in Egypt rose to more than 18% annually in 2009 from 5% in 2006, a more normal year. In Iran, the rate went to 25% in 2009 from 13% in 2006. In both cases the rate subsided in 2010 but remained in double digits.

Egyptians were able to overthrow the dictatorial Hosni Mubarak. Their efforts to fashion a more responsive regime may or may not succeed. Iranians are taking far greater risks in tackling the vicious Revolutionary Guards to try to unseat the ruling ayatollahs.

Probably few of the protesters in the streets connect their economic travail to Washington. But central bankers do. They complain, most recently at last week’s G-20 meeting in Paris, that the U.S. is exporting inflation.

China and India blame the U.S. Federal Reserve for their difficulties in maintaining stable prices. The International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, always responsive to the complaints of developing nations, are suggesting alternatives to the dollar as the pre-eminent international currency. The IMF managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has proposed replacement of the dollar with IMF special drawing rights, or SDRs, a unit of account fashioned from a basket of currencies that is made available to the foreign currency reserves of central banks.

About the only one failing to acknowledge a problem seems to be the man most responsible, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In a recent question-and-answer session at the National Press Club in Washington, the chairman said it was “unfair” to accuse the Fed of exporting inflation. Other nations, he said, have the same tools the Fed has for controlling inflation.

Well, not quite. Consider, for example, that much of world trade, particularly in basic commodities like food grains and oil, is denominated in U.S. dollars. When the Fed floods the world with dollars, the dollar price of commodities goes up, and this affects market prices generally, particularly in poor countries that are heavily import-dependent. Export-dependent nations like China try to maintain exchange-rate stability by inflating their own currencies to buy up dollars. […]

Oil is going up. Foodstuffs are going up. And when the Fed sneezes money, the weak economies of the world, and the poor masses who are highly vulnerable to price rises in the necessities of life, catch pneumonia. […]

The Fed is financing a vast and rising federal deficit, following a practice that has been a surefire prescription for domestic inflation from time immemorial. Meanwhile, its policies are stoking a rise in prices that is contributing to political unrest that in some cases might be beneficial but in others might turn out as badly as the overthrow of the shah in 1979. Does any of this suggest that there might be some urgency to bringing the Fed under closer scrutiny?

Federal Reserve Chariman Bernanke was appointed by Obama to do Obama’s bidding. And the Fed under Bernanke is trying to cover for the most reckless government policies in American history.

Obama is exporting “God damn America” all over the world. And pretty soon the world will start paying us back in giving us hell like even the Great Depression generation has never seen.

I ended the above article that I wrote before the election in 2008 (October 10, 2008) saying:

Is Barack Obama the Antichrist? There sure are a lot of signs that he is in the media! But I believe that he is just one of the false messiahs (Matthew 24:24). Rather than being THE Antichrist, I believe that Obama is just one of the false messiahs who will so completely screw up the United States and the world that Antichrist will be able to emerge to “save the day.”

The United States isn’t mentioned in Bible prophecy. Now we begin to see why: we wont’ matter because our economy will be in ruins. And we certainly won’t be the kind of nation that will be willing to come to Israel’s aid against the Beast when they need us most.

When you voted for Barack Obama, you generation of fools, you voted for Armageddon. Weakness is a provocation to the violent, and Obama is weak. And out of the economic hell that Obama has spent going on 2 1/2 years enacting – and which is already having dangerous global consequences – dictators always come.